Chapter published in:
Opera in Translation: Unity and diversityEdited by Adriana Şerban and Kelly Kar Yue Chan
[Benjamins Translation Library 153] 2020
► pp. 135–158
Translations, adaptations or rewritings?
English versions of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni
Pierre Degott | University of Lorraine, France
This paper analyses the various English translations of Da Ponte and Mozart’s Don
Giovanni, with an aim at showing that each version tends to adapt the social, cultural and sexual
contexts of the opera. From Natalia Macfarren’s Victorian translation of the 1870s to Jeremy Sams’ modern version
currently in use at the English National Opera, via Edward Dent’s sprightly text written in the 1930s for the London
lower middle classes, Ruth and Thomas Martin’s version meant for a conservative American public and W. H. Auden’s most
poetical reinterpretation, all versions resort to strategies aimed at drawing on the new receiver’s culture. Whatever
their own specificities, all versions tend to reduce the strangeness and otherness of the original text, offering
their own interpretations of Mozart and Da Ponte’s universal masterpiece.
Keywords: adaptation, Auden, Da Ponte, Dent, Macfarren, Mozart, music-linked translation (MLT), rewriting, Sams, translation
Published online: 29 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.153.07deg
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.153.07deg
References
References
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Libretti
Da Ponte, Lorenzo
Moncrieff, William T.
Müller, Ulrich, and Oswald Panagl
Vocal scores
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
[1850] Don Juan; or the Libertine punished. (Il Don Giovanni) ossia (Il Dissoluto punito). Founded on the Spanish tale of L. Tirso de Molina by the Abbé da Ponte, and rendered into English from the Italian by J. Wrey Mould. Revised from the orchestral score by W. S. Rockstro. London: Boosey and Co.
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